The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  So many last glances will haunt me forever. Those of the Moroccan generals, colonels, captains, accused of having fomented – or of not having foreseen – the 1972 attempted coup against Hassan II of Morocco and his guests at Skhirat palace, who were driven to their place of execution in covered lorries open at the back. Sitting on facing benches, they stare at one another, and the photographer captured the moment when, in the dazzling sunlight, they see the firing squad that is to execute them. It is an unforgettable photograph, published in Paris Match, which captured what Cartier-Bresson called the ‘decisive moment’: we do not see the firing squad; instead we see the eyes of those who see it, who are about to die in a hail of bullets and who know it. In spite of fables of peaceful passing from life to death, such as Greuze’s painting, The Death of a Patriarch, or La Fontaine’s tale of ‘Le Laboureur et ses enfants’ [‘The Labourer and His Children’], every ‘natural’ death is, first and foremost, a violent death. But I never felt the absolute violence of violent death more than I did as I looked at that photograph, that snapshot. In that searing intensity, whole lives were laid bare before our eyes: these men were privileged, well-to-do members of the regime, they did not choose to risk their lives, unlike the heroes of the Resistance who, refusing the blindfold, stood to attention before the rifles and remained valiant even as the guns rang out. Why do I remember one face, one name so particularly – one I would never think to verify – Medbouh? He was, I believe, a general and devoted to his king, but the savagery and the vast spectre of the crackdown would not spare him. It is sweltering hot, sweat beads on his forehead, the irreparable is about to occur, and Medbouh’s last glance, frantic with fear and disbelief, evokes the greatest pity.

  Another last glance, also from Paris Match: that of a hard-faced young Chinese girl screaming her revolt before the judges at the moment that she learns she has been condemned to death. Face contorted, torn between pain and refusal as policemen’s hands grab her and drag her away. In China, she knows, executions take place very quickly after sentence is pronounced, and the series of photographs published by Paris Match bears witness to the inexorable sequence of moments leading to her death. In the next photograph we see a second hand that, with overpowering force, pushes her head down to expose her neck but also to compel her to die in the position of a penitent. And, since executions there take place in public, to serve as an example, the last photographs show the pistol firing into the back of her neck and her battered, martyred body slowly slipping to the ground. Barely thirty minutes have elapsed between verdict and death. Other photographs, other films regularly reach us from China, all equally terrifying: a line of young men in black prison uniforms shot one by one, through the back of the neck, by a police executioner in white gloves wearing a peaked cap and full dress uniform, who forces each man’s head into the same penitent posture, as though the death penalty were the supreme act of re-education.

  Still in China, the same China, the China of today. In Nanjing there is a Chinese Yad Vashem, solemn, simple, poignant, which commemorates the great massacre of 1937, in which the Japanese Imperial army, the moment they had captured the city, murdered 300,000 civilians and soldiers, killing in a thousand different ways, each more inhumane than the last. The goal was to terrorize the entire country and, beyond that, the whole of South-east Asia, all the way to New Guinea. They achieved that goal. Wandering through Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall with the curator who, in his humility, his calm, his lack of bombast in the face of the crushing weight of evidence, his reverence, the present incarnation of ancient suffering, ineluctably reminded me of the Israeli survivors in Kibbutz Lohamei HeGeta’ot in Galilee or at Yad Vashem during my preliminary research for Shoah, once again I realized that there is a universality of victims, as of executioners. All victims are alike, all executioners are alike. In Nanjing, to train the Japanese army rabble, bayonets fixed, in hand-to-hand combat, realism was pushed so far as to lash live targets to stakes as instructors gave detailed demonstrations of how and where the bayonet should be thrust: the throat, the heart, the abdomen, the face, all in front of the petrified faces of the guinea-pigs. Accounts and photographs bear this out, they show the faces of soldiers moving from crude laughter to rage and back again as they plunged their bayonets into the victims’ bodies. Those lashed to the next stakes awaited their turn, which came as soon as the previous targets breathed their last. The soldiers did not train on corpses; the dead feel no pain.

  Through a long tradition, a punctilious codification, the Japanese became masters in the technique – the art, they call it – of beheading by sabre (something that can also be seen at the Nanjing Memorial), and organized contests between their most skilled men. How to describe, beneath the yellow summer uniform of the Mikado’s troops, its curious peaked cap framing with neck-cloths of floating fabric, the astonishing musculature of the swordsmen, steel bands of muscle that seem to be part of the sabre itself in that very moment when, gripped firmly in both hands, brandished high and vertical, it is about to sweep down a mere fraction of a fraction of a second later? Everything happens so quickly that the sabre passes through the neck while the head remains in place: it has no time to fall. What pride, what pleasure in a perfect execution, what smile of satisfaction on the face of the contest winners when, in the minutes after the competition, full of themselves, they posed beside the headless bodies, the bodiless heads.

  And yet it is not in Nanjing, but 8,000 kilometres to the south, in Canberra, Australia, that, for me, was the culmination of horror. In Canberra there is a remarkable war museum, the Australian War Memorial, that is like no other in the world. Perhaps it is because Australia is not populous that every life is precious to them, and also because they have never fought a war in their own country, but only in distant lands. During World War I the Australian Expeditionary Force lost – who still remembers? – tens of thousands of men at Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles and on the French front. Between 1939 and 1945, on every front and in every branch of the army, many more selflessly spilled their blood to liberate Europe and Asia from barbarism. In Canberra, in one of the halls of the museum devoted to World War II , I could not tear my eyes from an extraordinary photograph, the work of two artists in the Japanese army: the photographer himself and the executioner. In an incredibly daring, low-angle shot, the photographer has succeeded in framing both executioner and his victim, a tall Australian, on his knees, arms pinioned, wearing a white blindfold. He has a chinstrap beard, his upper body is erect, his neck as long as a swan’s, his head barely bowed, hieratic, his face a mask of ecstatic suffering, like those in El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz. Above him, in the upper part of the frame, in the yellow uniform I have already described, the killer, face tensed in a rictus of concentration, arms raised to heaven, hands, white-knuckled, gripping the hilt of his sabre, which forms the apex of this devastating trinity. But though it may begin its trajectory on the vertical, it is on the horizontal that the blade will come to rest, having traced a perfectly controlled arc through space. Such is the mastery. Next to the two photographs of the Australian prisoner, one taken before the beheading, one after, is a letter, preserved like a precious relic, the letter that the executioner wrote to his family in Japan from the theatre of war in New Guinea, in which he gives details of his feat, boasting about the singular skills he required and marshalled to accomplish it (an English translation hangs next to the ideograms of the Japanese original).

  But having spoken of the muscular backs of the swordsmen, having mentioned El Greco, I immediately think of Goya, the Goya of Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo, which I have so often stood and gazed upon in the Prado, turning away each time only with great difficulty, as though to walk away were to relinquish some supreme, some ineffable knowledge, utterly offered, utterly hidden. And yet in this remarkable painting everything is said, everything can be read, everything can be seen: the impenetrable wall formed by the serried backs of the Saxon fusiliers of the Grande Armée, black shakos pulled down over
their eyes, swords slapping against their thighs, calves sheathed in black gaiters, left legs thrust forward, bent slightly in the classic position of a rifleman at drill, bayonets fixed, the barrels of their rifles perfectly aligned. The executioners are anonymous, all we can see are their backs weighed down with the trappings of an expeditionary troop, while the angle of their shakos tilted down over the sights of their weapons makes it clear that they are oblivious to the dazzled, dazzling faces of those they are gunning down. Between killers and victims, the light source, a square lantern, is set directly on the ground, its blazing light illuminating the night-time assassination with a vivid, surreal glow. The genius of Goya is that in the foreground, facing the lantern, the shakos, the rifles, standing out against the shadows and the hills of Príncipe Pío, and the vague intimation of the city beyond, it is the truly preternatural whiteness of the central figure’s shirt itself that seems to illuminate the whole scene. Two rival light sources are at war, that of the victims and that of their killers, the former so bright, so intense that it transforms the lamp into a dark lantern. Around the man wearing this shirt of light, the morituri seem grey or black, stooped, shrunken, hunched as though to offer no purchase to the bullets. A huddled mass climbs the steep narrow path to the place of execution. Suddenly, as they reach the summit, they see it all: the bloody corpses of the companions who went before them, the others, fatally wounded, already falling, and facing them, the firing squad relentlessly taking aim at each new group as it arrives. So as not to see, not to hear, they cover their eyes, their ears in a final posture of denial and of supplication. But in the centre, in the midst of those who have been shot, who are falling, at the absolute heart of it all, is he towards whom everything converges; kneeling yet huge, all the more huge because he is kneeling, in the instant before being hit, his shirt of light still immaculate, the man in white gazes, wide-eyed, upon his imminent death. How to describe him? How to depict his chest magnified, offered up to the gun barrels, its incredible whiteness, like an armour for his final hour? How to describe his mad, bulging eyes beneath the coal black of his eyebrows, his arms up, flung wide, not vertically, not crosswise but out at an angle, in a last gesture of bravado and sacrifice, of rebellion and helplessness, of despair and pity? How to convey his mute proffering, the message to his executioners written on his face, in every line of his body? In 1942, 130 years later, at the fortress of Mont Valérien in Paris, joining the ranks of those heroes of the night, the Communist Valentin Feldman addressed his unforgettable last words to the German riflemen about to execute him: ‘Imbeciles, it is for you that I die!’

  Why is there no end to this? Twenty years pass, and we find ourselves crossing the place de l’Alma towards the Spanish Embassy, fiercely guarded by a police cordon, to plead, although we have no illusions, for Julián Grimau, sentenced to death for trumped-up crimes supposedly dating back to the Civil War. In reality it was because he was a militant member of the clandestine Communist Party of Spain, a membership he proudly and publicly avowed when he was arrested, before he threw himself from a second-storey window during his interrogation. Cruelly tortured, in spite of his broken wrists, Grimau was hurriedly executed in the dead of night, by the light of car headlamps in the courtyard of the Campamento military barracks in Madrid a few hours after our demonstration in Paris. It was 20 April 1963. El Caudillo was fiercely stubborn and, until he was in his final death throes – as we know, he was kept alive with tubes and wires for months as all Spain held its breath – he continued to send men to their deaths. On 2 March 1974 the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed by the garrotte in Modelo Prison in Barcelona. This method of meting out capital punishment was codified as the garrotte vil, which can be simply translated as the ‘infamous garrotte’, but ‘vil’ in French can also be translated as ‘base’ or ‘lowly’: the condemned man dies sitting in a high-backed chair, his feet and hands clamped in vices, making it impossible for him to move; his neck is circled with an iron collar tightened by a screw at the back of the chair – slowly or quickly according to the cruelty or the professionalism of the executioner – crushing the carotid artery and then the spine. There is a specifically Catalan variation of the garrotte vil, where the collar is fitted with a spike that pierces the back of the neck as it crushes. Puig Antich was the last man to be garrotted under Franco, and for him too we protested in vain. The death penalty was abolished in Spain in 1978, so there is an end to this sometimes, somewhere.

  Even as I write, the death penalty still flourishes throughout the world. I have said nothing of the anti-abolitionist states in the United States of America, each clinging to its own singular inhumanity, whether it be the electric chair, lethal injection, the gas chamber, the gallows. Nor have I said anything about the Arab countries, about the Saudi executioners who arrive ceremoniously at the place of execution in their white Mercedes, while the prisoner, already kneeling, head slightly bowed, waits for the white flash of the curved blade to behead them in public. They at least are experts, capable of competing with the Japanese executioners I spoke of earlier. Today, the time of the butchers has come (and I ask actual butchers to forgive me, for they practise the most noble of professions and are the least barbarous of men): why have we not been allowed to see the appalling images of hostages put to death under Islamic law in Iraq or in Afghanistan? Pathetic amateur videos shot by the killers themselves, which aim to terrorize – and succeed. Was this any reason to censor such images in the name of some dubious code of ethics, whose sole effect was to hush up an unprecedented qualitative leap in the history of global barbarism, to cover up the arrival of a mutant species in the relationship between man and death? And so these videos circulate clandestinely, and very few of us have been able to witness the true extent of the horror, struggling not to look away.

  This is what happens: the film opens with a litany of verses from the Qur’an, which appear on screen as they are recited. As in pornographic films, there is no editing, no connection between the shots, which shift abruptly: suddenly the Tribunal appears, framed against a black background that fills the whole screen. In the foreground, kneeling, ankles shackled, hands tied, is the accused. Behind him, the Grand Judge and his assistants, tall, black-hooded phantoms, Kalashnikovs slung across their chests, meeting at the sternum, barrels pointing upward. The Grand Judge alone speaks. He does so in a deep, droning voice, he reads or does not read, it depends. He goes on speaking for some time, his voice becoming more furious, more sententious, a performance that culminates (he literally ‘makes himself’ angry) as the moment approaches when sentence is pronounced and carried out. The accused, whether or not he understands Arabic, knows that his fate is sealed, that at the end of the grandiloquent sequence of justifications adduced for the verdict, his life will be taken. Does he know how it will happen? Does he sense it? In the twenty or so ‘films’ I have managed to watch – all of them repulsive – I will retain only one. During the black-robed prosecutor’s long, furious tirade, the hostage remained completely motionless: no movement, unblinking, his gaze vacant, staring into space, as though he had already left this life and must now suffer the worst so that he could rejoin himself. Utter resignation. He is still a young man, his hair is curly but his face is gaunt, and he has clearly already suffered the most terrible physical and psychological agony, the hellish torture of experiencing hope before losing it forever. He shows no sign of fear, he is the embodiment of fear, made rigid by fear. As soon as the last word of the sentence is uttered, the Grand Judge, who has been standing directly behind the prisoner, brings his right hand to his belt and draws a huge butcher’s knife, brandishing it in front of the camera, shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ as he simultaneously seizes the prisoner by the hair and throws him to the ground, while one of the hooded henchmen grabs his ankles so he cannot struggle. It is with this butcher’s knife that he will behead the prisoner, but not before forcing the poor man to look into the camera, to look at us. And so, several times during the procedure, we will see the e
yes of the prisoner roll wildly in their orbits. But a human neck, even one emaciated by starvation, is not composed entirely of soft tissue: there is cartilage, cervical vertebrae. The killer is tall and heavily built, but even he has trouble finding a clear path for the blade. So he begins to use it like a saw, sawing for as long as necessary, through the spurts and spatters of blood, an unbearable to-and-fro motion that forces us to live through, right to the end, the slitting of a man’s throat, like an animal, a pig or a sheep. When the head is finally severed from the body, the hand of the masked sawyer signs his work by displaying the head, placing it facing us, on the headless trunk; the eyes roll back one last time, indicating, to our shameful relief, that it is over. But the camera keeps filming, the hooded men have left the scene, a clumsy zoom shot frames the head and the torso, which now fill the screen, alone, in close-up, for a long moment, for our edification and our instruction. The face of the dead man and of the living man he was are so alike that it seems unreal. It is the same face, and it is barely believable: the savagery of the killing was such that it seemed it could not but bring about a radical disfigurement.